Surveys conducted in five cities as part of the Research and Evaluation Center’s project for the National League of Cities and its Institute for Youth, Education, and Families.
Surveys conducted in five cities as part of the Research and Evaluation Center’s project for the National League of Cities and its Institute for Youth, Education, and Families.
Overall, the interrupter model appears to be effective, according to a 2017 study by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. In one Bronx neighborhood, the number of shooting victims fell 63 percent during a period when interrupters were active compared with rates before the program began, the study found.
New York’s Osborne Association operates a reentry program called “Prepare” for fathers and father figures returning home from prison. With funding from the Office of Family Assistance within the Administration for Children and Families in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the Prepare program aims to improve relationships between formerly incarcerated fathers and their children using a family-centered approach focusing on parenting and workforce skills with one year of follow-up support.
Jeffrey Butts, director of the Research and Evaluation Center at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said that there was no discernible migrant crime wave. “I would interpret a ‘wave’ to mean something significant, meaningful, and a departure from the norm,” he said. “So far, what we have are individual incidents of crime.”
New York City’s Department of Youth and Community Development implemented three potentially effective programs to prevent violence, reduce crime, and support resident well-being. Effective evaluations rely on detailed frameworks that guide data collection, data analysis, and the interpretation of results. To design reliable evaluations of complex programs, researchers collaborate with policymakers, agency leaders, program staff, and community residents to create detailed evaluation frameworks, revising them as necessary to account for changes in policy and practice. The evaluation frameworks presented here are draft versions offered as starting points for efforts to employ evidence-based public safety strategies in New York City.
“If a politician tells someone with basic math skills to go through advocacy materials and extrapolate from those numbers to make an argument, you can do that,” [Jeffrey] Butts said. “Of course, you end up saying things that are ridiculous.”